Thursday, June 02, 2005

Constitution update.

Yesterday, the spokesperson of the constitution drafting committee Mrs. Maryam Al-Rayis confirmed again that Sunni Arab comprise "an excellent percentage" of the body of the constitution drafting committee as many personalities have been added to the committee from different Sunni parties and entities.

She also pointed out that this committee had practically started working and that "it is now the most active element among other work teams in the National Assembly" and that daily meetings are being held in an attempt to accomplish the mission of writing the draft of Iraq's new constitution before the deadline that was set to be on the 15th of August.

She explained that there are a number of points that are currently the hot topics of the discussions, namely the shape of the federalism that fits for Iraq, the issue of the relationship between religion and the state and the issue of the official language of the state.It had also been decided to hold weekly meetings with civil society organizations on Thursdays every week to remain in touch with the public opinion through talking to those organizations and asking for their opinions.

On another subject I learnt that there's a suggestion from one of the Assembly's committees to replace all the old identity cards, especially the "citizenship certificate "and the "civil affairs ID" with new cards of high quality to override the problems caused by the low quality of the old ones which made them easy to forge.The suggestion also includes issuing one new card for each citizen instead of the 2 or 3 currently used cards in order to simplify and decrease the amount of paperwork needed in government offices.